


set my cloudy sail straight

by paperiuni



Category: The Gracekeepers - Kirsty Logan
Genre: F/F, Grief/Mourning, Living Through, Sailing, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 08:46:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8884519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: North and Callanish, in the after, finding their feet with one another.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AntigravityDevice](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AntigravityDevice/gifts).



They gave the bear to the deep on a cloud-lit night when the full moon shone through a misty veil upon the dot of the _Excalibur_. The sea lay flat as a looking glass. Dressed in her mother's undyed linen dress, Callanish sewed the final stitch through his black, hardened snout and whispered the words.

She would choose a grace when they came back to her graceyard. A large and unwithered one, with glossy eyes and wings of shining turquoise.

North stood with the baby in her arms and watched. Her dark hair was a saltwater tangle, the gold in it flaked and faded. Silent tears ran down the sides of her nose, but Callanish kept speaking. She'd Rested uncounted people. She could Rest a bear for the person who'd loved him above all else in the world.

Without the bear, she never would have found North.

She felt the bristling fur through the sailcloth and stroked long lines along his heavy shoulders. _Thank you. Thank you for taking care of her._

With a splash and a great welling ring of ripples, he was gone. North made a small sound, a swallowed sob.

Callanish went to the bear-girl, standing without her bear for the first time in her life, and held her as the moon swam back into deep cloud.

*

"No," said North, folding her arms. "I'm not sleeping in the cabin."

"Wouldn't be warmer?" Callanish peered in through the doorway. The signs of a busy, cramped life littered the cabin still. Whalebone combs lay like little crescent moons on top of a rumpled blue dress. A shirt with a collar of paper ruffles dangled on a hanger from a hook.

"I want to be on deck, close to the stars. I want her to learn that." Maybe _her_ meant the baby, but the way North's tongue whetted the word into a dark, glass-sharp thing made Callanish doubt that.

"All right," Callanish said, feeling nicked herself. "Can we at least take the bedding?"

That North agreed they could do.

*

They struck out as close to the outer edge of the ship-lane as they dared, poring over the sea-charts that the ringmaster had left in the cabin. North hadn't want to go ashore as long as they were hugging the North-East island chain. Callanish, her nose full of the smell of pines and oaks, had agreed. The _Excalibur_ 's water filter was old and temperamental, but North was apt at coaxing it back into working order. Supplemented by the freshwater barrels, they could sail on until they reached the end of the archipelago.

The work of the ship and the care of the baby made them both fall into a pattern of labour. North with her strong arms was needed to steer the ship in higher wind. Callanish had the patience to stare at the charts and peer at the nocturnal in the light of a seal-fat lamp to keep them on course.

She was a little grateful now for her voyage in the messenger's boat. She could retrace the path and read the winds that would carry them back to the equatorial waters.

It wasn't much, as destinations went. A tin hut encircled by the dead under the water. It was the only one Callanish had been able to offer. North nodded and pressed her wrist, as if taking Callanish by the hand would've been a touch too far.

The circus was gone, and the bear, and Callanish knew she couldn't step into that particular void.

Yet when the baby slept and the night wind rustled the sails, she saw North lean over the wheel and watch her aim the cross-staff. There was a twinkling hunger in her eye, a laughing caprice that made Callanish's fingers fumble with her instruments and parched her mouth.

North had taken her hand. She'd felt the webbed fingers that Callanish showed openly to her tiny, expansive audience of North, the baby, and the sky. Callanish had followed that handclasp across half the world.

Or, she'd followed her mother, but the bear-girl had danced through her dreams.

*

"They say," North said one afternoon, "that in the South Ranges they have villages built on the sea. Not houses on posts like in landlocker ports, but houses on rafts cabled together. They follow the sea currents."

They lay on their bellies under the half-slack mainsail. The sun shining through it made the faded colours flow like driftwood flame, casting filmy shade across the deck. It was relentlessly hot, but the wind cooled them.

"They also say there's real land left somewhere." Callanish's unbound hair clung to the deck planking. She tugged a strand free. " _Callanish_ , the lost sacred land of the ancients. My mother thought..."

She didn't finish. North had been born on the ocean and loved it with a fierce love. Callanish was a child of the land, banished onto her graceyard where the bones of the dead were her only foundation.

She was a child of the sea, with her slashed gills covered from the sun with a silk scarf stolen from the cabin.

"My mother had a hope," said North softly. "She named me after the point of the compass needle so I'd always know my way. A lovely job I did of that."

The translucent shadow of the sail fluttered over them. North reached out a fine, bony finger and wrapped Callanish's pale hair onto it like a looped silver ring against her tanned skin.

"You didn't do so badly." _You found me. I found you._ In the world before, men and women wore rings as a sign of fidelity. An entanglement of fates. A choice to follow someone wherever they went. Was there a difference, if that someone pulled you even from beyond the horizon?

*

They had to put ashore at the tapering end of the North-East archipelago. They traded every knick-knack and spare article in the cabin, which North sniffed at in a way Callanish thought not to pry into just then, and filled their water casks. Green food was vital, too, but Callanish could dive for edible seaweed and they could trail fishing lines from the railings for the most part of their meals.

Callanish rowed the boat to the tiny port, paid dearly to pump their casks full of water from the brackish well, and pulled at her gloves as soon as she was again on the _Excalibur_. Her fingers itched. The skin had been worn by salt and breeze, but none so badly as the leather gloves seemed to do.

North grasped her wrist and tugged on each finger of the remaining glove. It slapped down onto the deck. They stood, Callanish with her arm outstretched, watching North put her steep-lined, serious mouth against the knuckles.

Sharp, dark North, her lips soft as a grace-feather on Callanish's skin. She felt a spark shock through her.

"Thank you," said North, "for going ashore. Let's stow the casks."

They did, straining side by side to haul them up one by one. The glove lay forgotten on the sun-baked planks.

*

Since North wouldn't go into the cabin, Callanish didn't, either. They rigged up old lengths of canvas on the outside of it and made tents of sorts: one for North and the baby, the other for Callanish.

At night they lay with their heads pointed at one another across the forbidden doorway of the cabin and talked until a dream, the first of the night, rolled over one or the other. Callanish fell asleep to the sound of North's voice or to the sight of her hair fanned against the pale, weathered deck.

_With this ship, you could go anywhere in the world. Why would you come with me?_

"If it storms, we'll have to go inside," Callanish said one evening when they both perched on the starboard railing.

"It won't storm. Not this time." North looked at the rose-coloured horizon with its spun banners of clouds, falling into shadow as the sun set.

"We aren't even halfway to the graceyard yet. It's not safe on the deck." Something wild and stubborn lived at the heart of North. Callanish had tasted it on the first night they'd spoken. She saw it now in North's devotion to the baby, who was tiny and well-behaved, as if she'd understood the trouble her mother had had letting her come into the world. She saw it in the way North drew a line and then it was there, definite and unerring.

"We'll go below decks. I'll make a hammock for Ursa."

It was bad luck to name a baby before it was at least a season old. Even a year, on some harsher or more devout islands.

North had decided it was time for a name, and so it was then.

*

Callanish swam up towards the dazzle of the sun on the water's surface, arms full of floaty, tendrilled seaweed. North said the ones with the three-pronged laminae were good eating. She broke through to the windless air, letting breath rush into her through her nose again. A crown of droplets rose and scattered around her.

"I wish I could do that!" North called from the railing.

"What, dive for this stuff?" Underwater the seaweed danced around her like unruly veils, but above, it became a soggy, clinging lump that filled her arms. She dumped it in the net they were using to haul it up.

"Swim down there," North said, a bit wistful. "There isn't a skin-diving lung here. I looked everywhere."

"Even the cabin?"

"Even the cabin."

They had come to the doldrums. Their pace had shrunk to a meandering drift, so they were sinking time into gathering supplies and fixing whatever could be fixed.

"We could trade for one." Callanish hung off the side of the ship for a moment, feeling the growing strength in her arms. Rowing her gracekeeper's boat was one thing, handling the _Excalibur_ entirely another.

"Does your supply boat carry—oh!" North's feet pattered off to the other side of the deck. Callanish craned her neck pointlessly to see. There hadn't been a single ship on the flat blue expanse when she dove. But time tended to become jelly-like and fluid in the sea, without the need to measure a dive by how long she could hold her breath.

"What is it?"

"The line!" North shouted. "Come, come up! The line!"

Callanish scarpered up the rope ladder and onto the deck, barefoot and dripping. One of the fishing lines was snapping and thrumming upon its reel, where North turned the crank two-handed to gather in the long taut metres of tough silk.

Whatever was on the other end was putting up much more of a fuss than their average catch. North rapped them dead with a smart strike from a wooden pin. Callanish was not squeamish, but she never seemed to know exactly where to aim the pin to kill the fish in one blow.

She dashed to North to help in the arm-straining effort. Her hand slid on the metal crank, undoing a metre or three while North cast about for the pin. "Oh, oh, don't let it go!"

 _It's a sea monster_ , thought Callanish brazenly as she wound in the line. _A dragon with long whiskers and pearls for teeth._

Or a person, smooth with scales, lithe as a fish, who had swum too close to the air-breathers' vessel.

It burst from the mirror of the sea and shattered the sun's image as it came. Blue and black and shining, its tail cut the air and slapped a gouge into the deck plants. The tunny crashed on the deck in their midst like a catapult stone. The line whipped about it in silvery curls, disappearing into its gaping mouth.

"Quickly!" Callanish could see, even in the ruckus, that the fish was big enough to feed them for days.

With a heave of its tail, it thrashed back towards the railing. North let out a yelp of alarm and frustration, and before Callanish had thought it through, she flung herself at the tunny.

Its fin tore the shoulder of her shirt. Her fingers slid against its bristled scales. It seemed a single purposeful muscle, spasming for freedom.

Then North sidled into the confusion of girl and fish, there was a smack of wood, and the great tunny flopped from Callanish's scale-riddled arms.

She looked at North. Pin still in hand, her own dress half soaked to her skin, North looked back.

Laughter bubbled under Callanish's tongue, but it was North who first let loose her joy. She broke into big, gasping giggles that shook her shoulders and made her double into a crouch, as if she couldn't stand for the sheer wild force of it.

Biting her lip to muffle the noise coming up her throat, Callanish stood there, soaked in seawater and fishscales, and realised, _I want to be with her._

"Let it out." North's voice hitched and flickered with laughter. "Callanish, let it out."

Callanish scrunched her mouth and squinted at her as she came closer, feeling the giggles slip free and peal into being. North took her hands to spin her in a circle, a circus dancer's slippery, glittering tease. There was nothing but delight on her face.

On a swash of courage, Callanish put her webbed hands on each side of North's shining smile and kissed her.

She wanted North's mystery. She wanted her sharp fingers and wayward resolution. She wanted the lean angles of her body and the sound of her unbound laughter. To meet the horizon with her wherever they chose to go.

North said, "Oh," before she kissed Callanish back with a salt-chapped mouth. It went from damp and clumsy to sweet and hungry, Callanish tipping into North's arms at her waist and back. The sun was hot on their heads. The kinks of North's hair caught in the webs of Callanish's fingers. She didn't care.

"We should," said North after a long spinning moment, "clean the fish."

Callanish laughed again, her embarrassment coming and going in the space of the sound. "There's the seaweed, too."

"After." North kissed her fingers.

"After," Callanish agreed, her heart a roar in her ears.

*

They cleaned the kelp and gutted and boned their sole catch, piling the better part of the fish into the salting barrel. They ate tunny and seaweed and drank thin tea. North tucked Ursa into the hammock strung under her canvas. The stars rose in misty splendour over the shoreless water.

Under the seal-fat lamp, Callanish thought of her map when she went over North's skin. It was filled with nicks and notches and arcs of healed scars, so many on a body that wasn't any older than her own. North's fingers wrapped themselves in her hair. She thought again of rings and promises, silver looped over skin, before North's breath quickened under her and she was lost in the here and now.

North bent herself between Callanish's narrow knees and shaking thighs. Oh, she had wanted without knowing the meaning: when she burst upon North's tongue, against her face, it ached and hollowed her. She had known desire. Knowledge of its fulfillment came in soft stages. In the first creeping in of her thoughts. In pulling North up, in kissing her after, messy and sweet.

"I want to—" She gestured down the curve of North's body.

"Stay." North spilled herself onto her back, breasts and belly and hips, teasing again. Her voice shivered. "I want you to. Later. Stay now."

Callanish ducked her head to put her mouth on hers, like a point. _I followed you. I found you. I'm here now._

The kiss became another, which slid from North's mouth to her throat, and Callanish let North hold her while she trailed the whorls and eddies of her bated pleasure until it flowed over. North's fingers pressed into her back to keep her close all through it.

*

The next morning, when they peeked out of under the canvas with blurry eyes, a soft wind bellied the mainsail and lifted its coloured stripes.

Hair in knots, brushing shoulders, knocking elbows, they sprang onto their feet to steer their ship across the dawning sea.

*

  
_I will mount a long wind some day and break the heavy waves_  
_And set my cloudy sail straight and bridge the deep, deep sea._  
—Li Bai


End file.
